Book Review

Before he decided to dispense entirely with the respect of his readership—which must have been, oh, some years ago now—Philip Roth used to try to balance the quotidian with a larger theme. In novels like I Married a Communist and The Plot Against America, he sought to mesh the “micro”—most usually the familiar world of Jewish angst in New Jersey—with the “macro”: the successive spasms of alarm and disorder that have punctuated modern American history.

In Indignation, he varies the procedure a little. Young Marcus Messner, in whose voice the book is narrated, is indeed an anxious Jewish youth from New Jersey, apprenticing in his father’s kosher butcher shop. But the action of the novel requires that he be deracinated and replanted in no less a setting than Winesburg, Ohio, “eighteen miles from Lake Erie and five hundred miles from our back door’s double lock.” His move is dictated by the need to escape his father’s demented overprotectiveness, a neurosis probably exacerbated by the rumors of a dreadful war in Korea. This conflict­—the gruesome stories of its bayonet charges and hand-to-hand slaughter putting him again in mind of the family butchery—bears directly on Marcus, who is liable for the draft. He knows, having lost two cousins to infantry fighting in the Second World War, that grunts have much less chance of survival than junior officers. He is therefore enrolled in the ROTC. Meanwhile, he studies political science and American government and waits tables at a local inn.

It will not surprise you to learn that this urban Jewish boy’s existence in such a bucolic WASP world is occasionally fraught:

More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words “Hey, Jew! Over here!” But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply “Hey, you! Over here!” I persisted with my duties, determined to abide by the butcher-shop lesson learned from my father: slit the ass open and stick your hand up and grab the viscera and pull them out; nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done.

In other words, Messner doesn’t quite have the knack of making things easy on himself. He quarrels with the Jewish boys with whom he is first made to room, and evinces a Holden Caulfield–like disdain for sharing with others at close quarters. Meanwhile, the reverses suffered by American forces in Korea, and the controversy over President Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur, have the local consequence of making it imperative that he lose his virginity with all speed:

There—yet another goal: despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.

The ordinariness of the prose here (“trammels holding sway” and all that) is matched by the familiarity of the Eros/Thanatos dialectic. But Roth takes things a step further, revealing that his narrator is speaking posthumously:

And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen.

Beginning with that rather breathless and rudderless sentence, Messner goes on to enlighten us by revealing that eternity is a constant hashing-over of the details of former existence. And which details might these tend to be? I think that I shall give away very little if I disclose that blow jobs and hand jobs, administered by a sweet but unstable shiksa, play a not inconsiderable part in Roth’s version of “memory cogitating for eons on itself.”

At all events, at about the one-fifth mark in the novel’s progress, we are abruptly made aware that Marcus Messner isn’t going to make it, and indeed hasn’t made it. How does he, as unreliable, not to say inanimate, narrator, contrive to fill the remaining time? Apart from a brief and sordid dalliance with the aforementioned shiksa—who is called Olivia and who turns out to have suicidal tendencies—he engages in warfare against the compulsory Christianity of the college. It has, apparently, come as a complete shock to him to learn that chapel attendance is mandatory and that he must listen to sermons and hymns. His outrage gives us the key to the book’s title. As a mantra with which to ward off the cadences of the Baptists, he sings to himself the Chinese national anthem, which he was taught as a patriotic duty during grade school in the Second World War. A stave of it goes: “Indignation fills the hearts of all our countrymen, / Arise! Arise! Arise!” and Messner finds the four-beat word Indignation to be especially heartening in his Kulturkampf with the dean of men. At one stage he quotes almost verbatim and at length from Bertrand Russell’s celebrated polemic “Why I Am Not a Christian”; one might wonder how a young man so determinedly and militantly agnostic would not have taken better care not to attend a piously Christian school.

The stress of all this helps to land Marcus in the infirmary, where his mother—already a martyr to her husband’s paranoia—comes to visit. Her emotional lecture makes one inquire if there is not supposed to be something onomatopoeic about the boy’s surname. “You are here” at Winesburg, she insists, “so you don’t have to be a Messner like your grandfather and your father and your cousins and work in a butcher shop for the rest of your life.” Then, later, after she has reproached him for keeping company with the wrist-slashing Olivia:

You are a Messner like all the Messners … The Messners aren’t just a family of butchers. They’re a family of shouters and a family of screamers and a family of putting their foot down and banging their heads against the wall, and now, out of the blue, your father is as bad as the rest of them.

A couple of pungent throwbacks to
Portnoy—including a nasty scene with a piece of liver (though not as explicit as Alex’s imperishable encounter with that viscous telltale organ) and a vivid episode of self-abuse involving a sock
—persuade me that a messy name is indeed part of the drab psychoanalytic furniture of this rather knocked-together novelette.

Indeed, it’s almost because of the involuntary mess that Marcus makes by vomiting in the dean’s office, and the deliberate mess made of Marcus’s clothes and belongings by a gruesomely insanitary roommate, that the climax of the tale becomes a weird blend of the dirty and the purgative: a sniggering panty raid that gets out of hand, but one that takes place in a white and obliterating blizzard. The male student body—if that’s the right term—of Winesburg takes leave of its collective senses and launches a sort of underwear pogrom that goes on for pages:

“Panties! Panties! Panties!” The word, still as inflammatory for them as college students as it had been at the onset of puberty, constituted the whole of the cheer exultantly repeated from below … Among the myriad objects seen dropping from the open windows that night were brassieres, girdles, sanitary napkins, ointment tubes, lipsticks, slips and half-slips, nighties …

Reviewing Roth’s Exit Ghost in these pages some months ago, I speculated that he sometimes urged his flagging prose along by giving himself something to jerk off about: in extremis, the very word panties was enough to bring young Alexander Portnoy to the sorry peak of yet another shuddering and solitary ejaculation. I lost count of the number of times Roth summoned the same magic term in this, the most hard-working and hard-worked passage of his latest book. So much effort, alas, for such scant effect.

The closing pages are by turns bizarre and strenuous, and in a manner that took me some time to decipher. As order regains its throne at Winesburg, and the young men succumb to a shamefaced realization of what they have done, Messner shouts out to his parents and his girlfriend, only to understand that he is now beyond the veil and has no audience:

There is only myself to address about my innocence, my explosions, my candor, and the extreme brevity of bliss in the first true year of my young manhood and the last year of my life. The urge to be heard, and nobody to hear me! I am dead. The unpronounceable sentence pronounced.

If I am not wrong, this is an allusion or
hommage to Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar classic,
Johnny Got His Gun, wherein a maimed soldier, rigidly comatose, is agonizingly aware of his surroundings while utterly unable to communicate even a hint of his own sentience to those around his bed. Our last glimpse of Marcus Messner is of a butchered figure, alive only in a morphine-induced dream, lying moribund on a Korean hillside that has just been stormed by Chinese soldiers yelling the “Indignation” anthem.

Roth gives the best lines in valediction to a pro-war speechmaker, the unpolished Republican pol Albin Lentz, who is the president of Winesburg College. Addressing his chastened male students in the aftermath of the panty scandal, Lentz showers them with scorn and contempt and compares their easy and silly hedonistic life to the Spartan tasks that await American manhood in the war against Communism. Here, Thanatos is being positively deployed against Eros. It’s quite clear from the context that Roth doesn’t in the least approve of Lentz’s sentiments, so it is all the more impressive that he awards him so much honor and gives such space to his grapeshot rhetoric.

Finally, a conundrum. Sherwood Anderson actually grew up in, and wrote about, the town of Clyde, Ohio, but his miniatures and microcosms were collectively titled Winesburg, and I shall be obliged to any reader who can make any suggestion as to why Roth chose to pick this of all midwestern towns as his setting. Writing about Anderson, John Updike was put in mind of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which demonstrated that “small-town people think a lot about the universe (as opposed to city people, who think only about each other).” And E.M. Forster said that Winesburg’s characters “live and breathe: they are beautiful.” It was perhaps incautious of Roth to booby-trap this very slight novel with clues to more serious and moving work by others. The characters in Indignation are for the most part thin and flimsy, and the contrived relationship between the local and the cosmic, or the local and the global, finally manages only to produce a mainly storm-in-a-teacup effect.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”